Welcome to Organizing Upgrade 2.0!

We are incredibly excited to bring you the new and expanded version of Organizing Upgrade. We started two and a half years ago to help left organizers respond to the rapid changes we saw happening around us following the onset of the economic crisis and the election of President Obama. And that pace of change has only continued to gain steam since then, with the rise of the Tea Party and the emergence of massive radical protest movements around the world. We truly live in amazing times.

If we are going to step up to the potential of this powerful moment, left organizers need a place to consider the rapidly changing conditions, to reflect on the limits and potentials of our organizing practice and to design new interventions to take our work to the next level. We believe that our work needs a serious upgrade if we are going to succeed. Organizing Upgrade is a forum for innovative progressive and left organizers to engage in that dialogue. We aim to promote a strategic approach to left organizing that is truly mass in character and that aims to win.

After two and a half years of great thinking by left organizers around the country, we decided to take the conversation to the next level by bringing you more frequent content and going deeper within different movements and sectors. So we invited in an incredible team of new editors who are rooted in these different parts of the social justice movement. These new members of the Organizing Upgrade team have taken up the responsibility of soliciting and developing regular content within their sectors of the movement in order to deepen the strategic dialogue, to promote big-picture thinking and to keep you up-to-date on the latest developments in politics and culture. We have new sections dedicated to:

Keep an eye out for a section dedicated to struggles around Gender & Sexuality - edited by Rickke Mananzala and others - in the months to come! These sections don’t represent all the crucial communities and struggles that are a part of our movement, so - if you are interested in taking on the work to edit a channel dedicated to another community or another set of issues - please contact us at upgrade @organizingupgrade.com!

We also decided that culture needed to be a bigger part of the conversation, and our new Culture editors - Purvi Shah, Terry Marshall and Thanu Yakupitiyage - have built out a whole new section of Organizing Upgrade dedicated to culture! Check it out here!

We believe it is crucial (but tragically all-too-rare!) for left organizers to keep up-to-date with national and international political developments. So we recruited some of our most avid news-reading friends (Jee Kim, Michelle O’Brien and John Whitlow) and developed a new “Best of the Left Web” feature to the site, where we collect links to good news and analysis that our editors and news collectors find around the web, updated daily.

Building on our incredible success with our Occupy Strategy Lab last fall, we’ll be featuring StrategyLabs on different timely issues as they emerge. So keep an eye out, or approach us if there’s a specific strategic conversation you’d like to moderate!

With all of this new material, you’ll have to keep in touch with us to keep up! You can do that by signing up for our email list, liking us on facebook, or signing up for our twitter feed!